Google's way of allowing sites to specify a normalized URL form for their pages. This allows google to treat various forms of the same URL as one URL for search purposes.

Carpe diem on any duplicate content worries: we now support a format that allows you to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL. If your site has identical or vastly similar content that's accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results. It also helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version.

Last week Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft announced support for a new link element to clean up duplicate urls on sites. The syntax is pretty simple: An ugly url such as http://www.example.com/page.html?sid=asdf314159265 can specify in the HEAD part of the document the following:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/page.html"/>

It may sound stupid to say that, but the ability to link is one of the best features of the web. It is then really important to make your links display as

It may sound stupid to say that, but the ability to link is one of the best features of the web. It is then really important to make your links display as convenient for use as possible. In the following collection you’ll find some tips to make your links better looking and more usable.

Interesting opinion piece on the hazards of link shortening services - inserts an unreliable middleman in the standard web transaction.

All good points in here.

"We need to prepare for the day when N of the URL shorteners go out of business. When that happens a large part of the web will die. It will not be a good day." - Scripting News http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/04/03/joshIsRightUrlShortenersAr.html

lets software development teams describe how software should behave in plain text. The text is written in a business-readable domain-specific language and serves as documentation, automated tests and development-aid – all rolled into one format.

Just to clarify, the use of “steal” and “stole’ is in the sense of “stole the game.” The point of this post is to explain how Google won, and not at all to suggest that they didn’t deserve to win. Google’s success is a direct reflection of how much value they create, i.e. A LOT — they solved a problem in the market that nobody else figure out how to solve or even recognized as the huge opportunity in the market. This post is also intended to help media companies understand better how Google works so that they can better compete in the web content marketplace, not to justify any feelings of “sour grapes.”

"If media companies want to compete with Google, they need to look at the source of its power — judging good content, which enables Google to be the most efficient and effective distributor of content. They also need to look at Google’s fundamental limitation — its judgment is dependent on OTHER people expressing their judgment of content in the form of links. Above all, they need to look at sources of content judgment that Google currently can’t access, because they are not yet expressed as links on the web."

As I start on my venture to really start using jQuery a lot more outside of simple form validation, I wanted to share some really great links I found lately that once again got me fired up about jQuery. This is part of my initial research into more jQuery as we’re going to be using it extensively in our new redesign for the .com I am working at so might as well dig more in now.
I’ve used jQuery in the past and know its power & philosophy behind unobtrusive JavaScript and JQuery, but have not yet worked on anything extremely extensive outside aiding to help create a custom validation control in MVC using jQuery in the past. Personally (some agree, some don’t) I think the jQuery Site’s tutorials & API docs are only “fair” at this point in time, so you need a lot of links to supplement the learning process. While yes, you keep hearing that jQuery makes things “easier”, no matter what you hear, the learning curve is a still bit steep at first for even some of the best developers I’ve

Below I explore and discuss the benefits of 13 Wordpress plugins that I have personally used on The Design Cubicle that will give your site an extra boost and provide a better experience for your visitors (plus some other great additions you can add).

People become freelancers for all sorts of reasons. Very few do it to get into business - that’s just a side effect. To be successful freelancers, we need to be savvy business people.
Understanding business takes work - some light reading, some heavy ploughing though your government’s forms and requirements, maybe some serious study, and keeping up with business news and events. Material for small businesses and entrepreneurs will be especially helpful.
Here is a reading list for you to pick and choose from: 40 Places Where Freelancers Can Learn More About Business. This list is a starting point.

Sources for business information for freelancers or self-employed persons.

Media search engine Technorati is about to release The Technorati Attention Index, which measures the mainstream media websites with the highest number of blogs linking to them in the past 30 days. Right now it has a blog post with the inaugural list. YouTube takes the top spot with the New York Times, BBC News, CNN.com, and MSN rounding out the top five. Compared to the top non-blog sources on Techmeme’s leaderboard, which is a narrower universe of sites which tech blogs link to, the top five mainstream media sites there are CNET News, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and Computerworld. (The leaderboard for sister site Memeorandum, which covers politics, more closely matches Technorati’s list).
Here’s the list in its entirety from Technorati’s index:
1. YouTube
2. New York Times
3. BBC News
4. CNN.com
5. MSN
6. guardian.co.uk
7. Washington Post
8. Yahoo! News
9. Reuters
10. Los Angeles Times
11. Telegraph.co.uk
12. MSNBC
13. Th

It's approaching two weeks now since Ruby 1.9.1 was released, bringing with it not only a whole stack of extra performance and a new VM, but also a lot of compatibility issues. No pain, no gain!
Thankfully, the Ruby community in its typical way has got to blogging, writing scripts, and what not, resulting in a flurry of useful links and resources for those brave enough to test the Ruby 1.9.1 waters. So here come 23 useful Ruby 1.9.1 links and resources! If you have any others you wish to add, please leave a comment as people will be checking those out too.

it’s a good idea to backup your Twitter archive on a regular basis in case of a Twitter mishap. As we all know, there has been numerous times in the past where users have lost followers, tweets, and DMs. Fortunately, you can make sure this doesn’t happen to you by using one of the following methods to backup your Twitter archive.

Backs up Twitter tweets, profile information and followers in case of a Twitter mishap.

Flash design is being used less and less within web design nowadays, ads and games aside. We all know how about its down sides, and everyone certainly hates the “Click here to open in Full Screen” links that are, fortunately, not being used as much as in years gone by. There is no denying it though, visually Flash is beautiful. Is it time for a revival?
Below we have 22 Flash Menu and Navigation Tutorials, they can all be used for all website designs, whether it be CSS or Flash.

Looking for great cultural and educational video? Then you’ve come to the right place. Below, we have compiled a list of 40 sites that feature intelligent videos. This list was produced with the help of our faithful readers, and it will grow over time. If you find it useful, please share it as widely as you can. And if we’re missing good sites, please list them in the comments below.

Clojure is a functional programming language for the Java Virtual Machine with several powerful features for building concurrent applications. In addition, Clojure is fast, robust, and a powerful general-purpose programming language. A dialect of Lisp, Clojure embraces traditional code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system, plus some syntactic sugar tailored to Java.

"RevCanonical is url shortening with a twist. Instead of creating its own super short versions of links, it checks to see if the link owner has published a shortened version of the given page using HTML link element. If not, we just return the original URL. And you should bug the link owner about providing a better alternative."

"url shortening with a twist. Instead of creating its own super short versions of links, it checks to see if the link owner has published a shortened version of the given page using HTML link element. If not, we just return the original URL. And you should bug the link owner about providing a better alternative."

A URL-shortening bookmarklet that looks for a canonical shortened URL (for example, a http://flic.kr link for a Flickr photo, or a gsfn.us link for Get Satisfaction) and returns it, instead of using a third-party service.

RevCanonical is url shortening with a twist. Instead of creating its own super short versions of links, it checks to see if the link owner has published a shortened version of the given page using HTML link element. If not, we just return the original URL. And you should bug the link owner about providing a better alternative.

So we sat down this morning and decided that we would put together a list of all the graphic design blogs that we follow as a team. We said that we would spend a single working day on it, no more, no less.

Benefits of Formatted URLs
While some claim pretty URLs help in search engine rankings, the debate here is fierce, we can all agree that pretty URLs make things easier for our users and adds a level of professionalism and polish to any web application. I could go over all the theoretical reasons for this, but I like real-world examples better. Like it or hate it we all must admit that Twitter is a wildly popular web application and part of the reason for that is most certainly how it formats URLs. I can tell anyone in the know that my Twitter username is noahhendrix, and they know my profile can easily be found at twitter.com/noahhendrix. This seemingly simple concept has vast effects in the popularity of your application.

Continuing our review of htaccess files, today we'll examine how to use mod_rewrite to create pretty URLs.Benefits of Formatted URLs While some

Explore and subscribe to their favorite sites in Google Reader, where keeping up with news and blogs is as easy as checking your email.

general excellen

powerreaders
Want to know what journalists, foodies, and tech bloggers read?
Explore and subscribe to their favorite sites in Google Reader, where keeping up with news and blogs is as easy as checking your email.

Share this on del.icio.usDigg this!Share this on RedditBuzz up!Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUponShare this on TechnoratiShare this on MixxSubmit this to DesignFloatShare this on FacebookTweet This!Submit this to Script & StyleShare this on DevmarksRelated PostsSensational List Of 25 The Best Design Worldwide Forums25 Sources For Logo Design InspirationHow To Create Popular Blog [...]

We’re marking the occasion by honoring 10 categories of 10 noteworthy sites each (plus one to make 101, of course). With this 10th roundup of meritorious sites, we’ve also sought to break the mold a bit and encompass more of the “Web 2.0″ sites that are paving the way for changes in online genealogy over the next 10 years. Something had to give, however, to keep our count at a manageable 101, so we’ve omitted some old favorites—still worth bookmarking, nonetheless—and several excellent foreign research sites of interest to genealogists with that particular ancestry.
Sites that are mostly free but where you might still wind up pulling out your credit card for some purchase or other are marked with a $. Subscription-only sites and those where you have to pay for any meaningful results are indicated with $$

Best in 10 areas for searching family history (many free sites includes but also includes $$$ subscribed resources)

Designing in Photoshop is not only a job for a designer but also a habit and addiction for designers. There is no limit in its learning. Like a new designers, an experienced person also learns everyday of its designing. Without tutorials, there is no other best solution to learn of it. A tutorial teaches a new designer and gives idea to an experienced campaigner. So, everybody loves to get new and newer tutorials of Photoshop. In the following, you will get 38 sites, which provides exciting Photoshop tutorials.

A site that provides a bookmarklet to save items on line. Put bookmarklets on all the browsers

Linklist lets you make lists of links with no registration required. You can decide on your topic, write a short description, and then develop an ordered or non-ordered list. After you’re done, you’re given an embed code and url address for it-- one click and all your resources are organized together! You can create linklists to share, and students can create their own linklists that are kept private. You do not need to register, but if you do register, you'll be able to update and edit your linklists. once you paste a url address into your list, the name of the link actually shows up as an active link Linklist would also really be great for teaching media literacy skills. Students could write additional descriptions next to each list item, then the list could be used more effectively for higher-order thinking skills like categorization or comparing information from different sources.

Social bookmarking and link sharing is probably the largest source of traffic for most of us. Sites like Stumbleupon and Delicious send hundreds of thousands of visitors across the blogosphere. So how can we encourage more people to share our links? One of the easiest options is to include a set of links at the bottom of your posts which readers can click to automatically vote for your article. There are plugins which can do this of course, but that requires you to work with their settings, names icons in their banner and it means having yet another plugin installed on your site. If you would rather avoid that and have complete control for yourself, then you might prefer to code the links into your theme yourself.

// The social blog scene is getting pretty crowded these days and we cannot just stand here without releasing a new list. So give it up for the coolest

The social blog scene is getting pretty crowded these days and we cannot just stand here without releasing a new list. So give it up for the coolest social media & social marketing blogs out there! Please leave some suggestions & feedback in the comments area.

Without an ordered approach, careful research and custom tools it can be difficult for link builders, writers and content strategists to know what content will attract links in a target market. This article provides a process and tools for developing and distributing linkable content based on the content that's proven to attract links in your target keyword space.

This is another post in freebie series, here will be huge numbers of photoshop brush you can download for free. Hope this post will help you in your design

This is another post in freebie series, here will be huge numbers of photoshop brush you can download for free. Hope this post will help you in your design process. If you have link to others great photoshop brush feel free to put it in the comment section. Enjoy.

It is easy to collaborate with your colleagues around you. What about other people in your PLN? Can you collaborate with 50, 100, 1000 people? "Collaborate", "Collaborative", "Collaboration" were the most frequent words I heard last year and I believe it will be more important and popular in this new decade. Here is my first 20 web tools to enhance collaboration among us!

In a recent “Open Mic” we asked you, “Which music-related sites do you visit regularly?” This article is a summary of the great suggestions given in the comments to that article. You can make the list even longer by commenting on this article.

We asked the author of @thewholeworld, who has about 2,500 followers, to run a series of three tests promoting various funny videos or articles. What we found was surprising; nearly all traffic to those links was within five minutes of the tweet. After that… nothing.

A marketers view in some respects but interesting none the less. "The moral of the story is that twitter is like any social event you've ever attended. You can't expect the person you've just met to know what you told someone in a previous conversation. So get involved, have fun and make connections with your consumers."

Based on anecdotal empirical testing, the average useful lifespan of a link shared on Twitter is only ~5 min.

with 5 take aways

Fuel Interactive is a full-service web design, development and marketing agency

MySpace is so 2003 while Twitter remains a mystery for most college students. As for Facebook, have you tired of a site where people you barely know send you stuffed animals and flowers yet?
There are hundreds of social networking sites where you

some of this are really cool sites to visit, like Geni, create a geneological tree for free, only family views it.

15 Way Cool Social Networking Sites You Never Heard Of: There are hundreds of social networking site... http://bit.ly/bbgJ8c [from http://twitter.com/charanjit/statuses/9530046964]

Link development is tough. Not everyone can create amazing linkbait, as easy as the experts make it sound. It’s not an easy proposition to get people to link to your website if you’re a local realtor, mortgage broker, or holistic doctor for that matter. It is POSSIBLE though with the right approach to actually solicit and develop links that will help your search engine rankings. From LOTS of trial and error, here’s the process I’ve developed for training link developers to become true link ninjas that will hunt and pursue links that actually make a site rank high for targeted terms.

For the latest release of Consume, we wanted to include two buttons: one that linked to all our apps on the App Store, and another that let users easily write a review on iTunes.
These both seem like common things iPhone developers would want to do, so we decided to share the results of our research. Some of the information contained below is obvious for experienced iTunes users, while other links are rarer.

This is a large collection of css resources that will help you in your every day web design and development tasks. Below you will find CSS Forums, discussion lists, resources, learning and tutorial sites for css, css blogs, css codes, css snippets, css galleries & showcases, layouts and more.

【deli_post】 » The Best Websites and Blogs of all time for Designers and Developers WebAir Blog http://goo.gl/cRdE #deli_post

a mega collection containing more than 60 addresses of websites and blogs for designers and developers. You can find resources of all kinds, from ruby on rails to ajax, from css to illustrator and much more!

How It Works
If one of your users clicks through to a product or service and buys something you automatically earn a commission. In return for the service we typically take 25% of those commissions. There is no risk, you only pay us a share of what you earn. Often you earn more with VigLink due to collective bargaining on commission rates, even after our 25% cut.

A little startup called Bit.ly has unseated TinyURL as the default link shortening service on Twitter. This isn't just about shortening links, though. "The truth about Bit.ly," enterprise software analyst James Governor said today, "is that it's not a URL shortener, it's a trend management and metrics platform."
The key idea behind the Web is that pages are connected through hypertext links. Google changed the world and made money beyond anyone's wildest dreams by analyzing those connections between pages. It was a simple proposition, at its core: the more a page is linked to, the more authoritative it is. The web isn't just pages anymore, though. Now the web also includes people as a fundamental factor to take into consideration.

important point: google analyses where links points, bit.ly analyses what links get shared where - twitter is another linking/pointing technology driven by people

Reading: Twitter Crowns Bit.ly As The King of Short Links; Here's What It Means http://bit.ly/bqqa2 [from http://twitter.com/sandroalberti/statuses/1731512637]